• Accepted Paper

Minding the gap between hard and diffractive structure functions at the electron-ion collider

June-Haak Ee, Christopher Lee, and Stella T. Schindler

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 26 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7jkz-3r9q

Abstract

Diffraction is characterized by forward scattering and a large rapidity gap. Ordinary hard scattering also produces gapped events and presents a significant background to identification of diffractively produced events. We present a fully differential factorization of gapped hard ep scattering. We find that the unpolarized azimuthally-dependent structure functions $F_{3,4}^{\rm gap}$ and the longitudinal $F_L^{\rm gap}$ vanish at leading power for hard scattering. Azimuthal dependence is thus a pure diffractive signature. This is borne out in Monte Carlo simulations.

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